We lost our favourite chicken last night. I know, just a chicken, right? Big deal. It's not like we lost a pet. But that's the thing, Amelia was more than just a chicken . She was a pet. She was very tame and would often come into the house to sit with one of us. She would scratch around the kitchen while we were eating breakfast then quietly cluck at one of us to be picked up for cuddle. We named her after Amelia Earhart because she was always the first of all our chickens to go ...

ARM processors, like those in your phone, have instructions capable of processing several elements at once (SIMD). These instructions are called NEON. But many newer processors have a different SIMD extension called SVE. The latest ARM processors have SVE2. Unfortunately, Apple has not yet adopted SVE, but SVE processors are available in the cloud. In April, I wrote that the SVE2 match instruction might be the fastest way to match characters on ARM processors . At the time, my benchmark was...

AI-generated text often carries invisible markers that most people never notice. These hidden watermarks — embedded by tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and others — can flag your content as machine-produced, which matters if you’re publishing professionally, submitting academic work, or building a brand voice that needs to feel authentically human. Here’s how to find those markers and strip them out. What Are AI Watermarks and Why Do They Exist? AI watermarks aren’t visible...

Introducing composable, module system native and agent friendly command line tools for modern Java development By Danny Thomas, JVM Ecosystem Team Recent work on the Java language to pave the on-ramp has made it easier than ever to start a Java program and evolve it using the full language and platform. At the end of that on-ramp lies Java’s mature build and dependency management ecosystem, capable of carrying software to enormous scale and complexity. That ecosystem reached its maturity by ...

I recently wrote about Jev , a new “System One” language model that only outputs decisions : the answers to a set of user-provided multiple-choice questions. This means it’s nowhere near as flexible 1 as a traditional LLM like ChatGPT, but in return it’s consistently fast. We don’t know exactly how Jev works. I’ve seen people say diffusion, or various tweaks to the Transformer architecture, or some entirely new type of model. But that doesn’t matter. Like I argued here , it i...

I feel kinda stupid for even saying this, but it’s probably worth saying anyway: companies are not people. Companies don’t make decisions. Companies don’t decide who they want to donate money to. Companies don’t feel shame. Companies don’t learn from their mistakes. Companies don’t have political orientation. Because companies are legal entities, they're a bunch of papers, letters and numbers. That’s what companies are. When you’re mad at a company, figure out who is actually ...

This week I was writing a story and noticed something strange: I didn’t give the document a title, but, after saving it, the document had a title that I did not expect. If I don’t have a name for a story yet, or if I am doing free writing, I will often not give a document a title, instead allowing the default behaviour in the tool I use to write, Typora , which is to take the first few words or maybe sentence of the document, or the first line. In the case of markdown, the first line is alm...

It sure seems that a bunch of companies are trying to ship a git product of some kind as of late. Wonder why that is. Either way, I’m building a Git server backed by object storage as an open-source project . It sounded simple enough to start: Git looks like a filesystem, so let’s use a filesystem as a translation layer on top of object storage to make Git speak object storage. This model worked… ok, I guess? But it didn’t work...

I’m talking in the context of industrial programming . A few statements I believe to be true: If you aren’t doing it hands-on, your opinion about it is very likely to be completely wrong . Being influential doesn’t automatically make you right. Talking about coding and delivering software under real constraints are two very different things. Before clicking on a programming video, it doesn’t hurt to check the creator’s credentials. Yet we keep listening to influential p...

I'm back from VCF Midwest 21 , arguably the largest vintage computer festival on the planet. After being blown away last year, I decided to get a table of my own this year, to demonstrate NTP Time on a bunch of old Macs, representing every era up to the pinnacle of the PowerPC, an Xserve G5 (serving duty as a Stratum 2 ntpd server). Attending as an exhibitor is a lot different. In some ways better (I got to interact face-to-face with at least 200 people—after that I ran out of ...

Hello, Join the huddle, while I regale you with more tales of the Penguin... Factorio on the Steam Frame raiguard When Valve originally announced their next-gen hardware , I was very excited for the Steam Controller and marginally excited for the Steam Machine, but I wasn't very excited about the Steam Frame. I have had the opportunity to play VR on my friend's HTC Vive; and on the occasions where I visit the Wube office in Prague, I have played on the company's Valve In...

I have a lot of mixed feelings about AI and LLM technology. I’m fascinated by its effect on our profession, excited by the potential gains in productivity - and thus the products we could rapidly build. On the other hand, I’m fearful of the damage AI might cause: agent swarms taking over our virtual and physical infrastructure, designing bio weapons. But, back on my first hand, LLMs might also design miracle cures, and come up with clever ways to raise our prosperity. Fundamentally I don’t...

0.0 Context setting A really short one today (fine, maybe not, at over 1,200 words). It’s Wednesday 16 September in Portland, Oregon, where it’s unseasonably warm and it threatens to continue to do so through the end of the week. 0.1 How People Work, Live Last episode was with Dana Chisnell and we had a great candid chat about small-p politics at work. I especially loved her framing about how soft skills are actually power skills. Dana’s episode is up on the podcast and YouTube n...

I’ve been doing some spring/fall cleaning and found an unpublished follow-up component to (a web component to “snow” on your website — which also happens to work with emoji too). Originally it was created as an easter egg for Blog Awesome (click on the Font Awesome flag in the very bottom of the footer) but others have wanted to use it for more things! Presenting: : Demo Source code on GitHub It’s in use on this page (if you are on my web site and not in a feed r...

I’ve heard a lot of talk about LLMs recently, and among the most common topics of discussion have been the comments. LLM comments generally seem to suck: they are verbose, regardless of surrounding context, they seem to encode conversation decisions (like “do it this way, not that way” [note: In my head, I've been calling this "comment hysteresis", because the comments are not a function of the final design, but of the path taken to get there. ] ), and they tend to use made-up vocab...

A new air defense strategy is needed to counter long range attack drones.  ... Read More A new air defense strategy is needed to counter long range attack drones.  ... Read More A new air defense strategy is needed to counter long range attack drones.  ... ... Read More Read More

I lost my keys earlier this week. I had one of those Orbit Key ring things, with my house keys, and the key fob to get back into the apartment building. It was going to be a Process™ to get these replaced, as some of them are fire keys with unique serial numbers that are forbidden to be cut. Just in case, Clara and I went around the suburb where I had the client meeting, including the path I took from the station, to the coffee shop, then back home again. We left notes with the shopping cent...

In 2004, two mathematicians hypothesized a powerful kind of sandwich. They were studying graphs, which are collections of points (called vertices) and lines (called edges). Graphs might represent anything from social groups to the internet to neurons in the brain. The mathematicians hoped to understand properties of one type of graph — a type that’s ubiquitous in mathematics and computer science… Source In 2004, two mathematicians hypothesized a powerful kind of sandwich. They were stud...

This blog is part of a series exploring the technologies and principles shaping the future of simulation. A program office asks a fair question about an autonomous aircraft. How will it learn to handle a specific threat, in a specific place, against a specific sensor picture, when its link to the operator drops? Not in a demonstration. In the conditions the mission will actually present. The honest answer is that the data required to teach that does not exist yet. That answer sits strangel...

Gracious gray amid the blue & bright Surreal silver against the night Sometimes an uncanny crescent or a gibbous glow in ascent Other times a hollow halo or a cloud glow Reflective and rolling, when near Stony stark skyline, when on it Cosmic microcosm , when held Enticing enigma , when leaving behind This is our monumental Moon, always around for a nature profound to be found Always around, always around for you no matter the morning it mourned through. Our Moon shining through tree branches i...

ITMS 2026 Two years ago I attended the International Manufacturing Technology Show  in Chicago's McCormick Place and found a rather limited focus on artificial intelligence among the exhibitors. ITMS is back in town so I went again this week. A quiet respite from all the AI/math angst, though that will come in full view when mathematicians take over the same venue in January. I picked up my badge, the last to say "Illinois Tech" as I registered for a free academic pass well before the lay...

Stars! is a 1995 4X game (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) for 16-bit Windows 3.1 that I first played ~28 years ago. While Windows is famously backwards compatible, it’s notoriously difficult to play Stars! today. Windows x64 cannot run 16-bit applications, and playing requires either retro hardware or emulation ( otvdm , DOSBox ), sometimes paired with Wine . My new, exciting solution, Stars!VM , or Stars! Virtual Machine , embeds a custom 80286 emulator and a Win16 to Win32 br...

I had the idea of writing about writing, more specifically handwritten content, and figured what better means of making a post about it than one consisting of handwritten scans. Be forewarned, being handwritten, there’s quite a bit less polish on my already rambling and disorganized content. If you can’t read my handwriting - be it because of a screen reader/accessibility need, the amount of data the page takes up, or just because it’s rather illegible - there is a Claude powered transcrip...